A Song for the Choir
by sxe fiend
Summary: Jonah Jeremiah Jones comes home to Bristol and tries to cope with tragedy and memories. He gets an unexpected visitor. A one-shot catalyst of a friendship.    Rated T for language and self harm.


**I don't own skins. **

**A Song for the Choir**

The handmade mobile swings violently from its thin wire, and he watches it eventually settle, entranced by its pendulous journey.

Nine planets.

Nine styrofoam spheres drenched in acrylic paint. His nine-year-old self had built them as nine reminders of certainty, nine emblems of a constant. The solar system was not like his rotating allotment of medication, or the arbitrary cruelty of his classmates, or his uncontrolled fits of verbal cacophony. It was a truth of calculated chaos. A comfort in the loneliness.

Now, Pluto is no longer an autonomous planet, and the newcomer, UB313, seems a blasphemous thing amongst its godly Roman neighbors. Yet, he feels compelled to recollect the extinct order of things, so he silently recites the now-obsolete phrases, his mouth contorts wildly to produce the mnemonics.

_My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas. _

_My Very Energetic Mother Jumps Swiftly Under Nana's Patio. _

_My Very Excellent Mother. _

_My Mother. _

_My_

_Mother. _

_Is _

_Gone. _

_My Mother Is Dead. _

Jonah Jeremiah Jones realizes that truth is a malleable, fickle thing. Truth is bent and distorted by doctors who promise a peaceful end. By train operators who promise only a short delay. By mourners who spew out hollow words of consolation. By fathers who play the parts of devoted widower, loving parent.

He lies in his wrinkled suit in his cramped bed in his crumpled life and numbly clings to his morbid repetition,

_My Mother is Dead. My Mother is Dead. My Mother is Dead. My Mother is Dead._

His empty blue eyes stare unwaveringly at the old truths and the spackled blue ceiling until he finally succumbs to exhaustion and falls into a fitful sleep.

….

He wakes to the static universe above him, his body still in a half-paralyzed state after heavy slumber. Sleep has eroded the numbness, and he mentally takes inventory of his injuries.

His knees and feet are throbbing. His hands are pulsing with pain as he raises them to eye-level and forms them into loose fists. His knuckles are bruised and cut and flecks of drywall and blood linger in the creases of his chapped skin. His head is throbbing and he winces as he recalls the chunks of his own hair he pulled out. His throat feels swollen and raw from screaming and vomiting.

He slowly surveys his childhood room to assess the damage. A large bookshelf is smashed face down into the floor. A ukulele lies in pieces. Its carcass is accompanied by bleeding pens, rumpled clothes, and forlorn books on the threadbare rug. Drawers of his dresser are pulled out to various violent degrees and there are chunks of cork missing from his bulletin board. He lazily sweeps his eyes across the rest of the room until they land on a figure in the armchair.

He flies out of the tangle of sheets, outjumping Lazarus, as he trips over his dress shoes and collides into the wall.

"Fucking, fuck. Shit. Jesus. Fuck! Fuuuck!" He screams across the room.

The young woman remains still, legs daintily crossed, her whole form stoically sunk into the shabby piece of furniture. Blue eyes unwaveringly staring at the shattered young man.

He studies her face, assessing her features before connecting them to a name. A person.

"Jesus fucking Christ, Effy!" He roars, giving in to the momentum of chaos. His eyes are wild and his curly brown locks jut out at odd angles.

"What the actual FUCK?"

She is unmoved by his volume and continues to stare at him before replying steadily.

"The front door was unlocked."

He lets out a cry. A strangled, guttural thing. Then lets his back drag down the wall until he's slumped on the floor. The flood of adrenaline leaves his body.

He becomes a boy in a man's suit once again.

They sit for a moment in tense silence. Two objects in the calm eye of a hurricane.

Effy presents a flask from seemingly nowhere and tosses it effortlessly across the space between them. He catches it just before it hits the worn hardwood floor and slowly runs his fingers over its cool metal surface.

He contemplates the easiness of oblivion. The adverse alchemy of medications swirling with alcohol. He considers the temptation of surrendering control briefly before shaking his head.

"I don't drink…still" he quietly states, eyes glued to the bare patches in his rug.

"Fucking _drink_ it, JJ," Effy evenly commands while barely moving.

The muscle memory of his teenage self kicks in, and he uncaps the flask, shuts his eyes, and lets the cool liquid pour down his throat in one swift motion. He is surprised by the unexpected saccharine taste.

Mango Juice.

He wipes the side of his mouth, briefly noting a stinging, shallow cut on his lower lip, and finally meets Effy's gaze. His expression is a mix of bewildered gratitude and hesitation.

"Everyone calls me—"

He pauses, backtracks, and clears his throat before beginning again.

"I go by Jonah, now" he quietly finishes as his eyes find their way back to their spot on the rug.

"Interesting," she simply states.

He softly chuckles at her brevity. At the logic of it all.

He would be floored if she had instead asked him about the weather or even gave him the uniform utterance of condolences.

He has never truly understood Effy Stonem.

Then again, no one else has either.

And that has always been a great comfort to him somehow.

He takes another swig from the flask and lets his legs slide out from beneath him. He feels every sore spot of inevitable bruises and evident scrapes and he holds back a moan as he wonders if there is any part of him that doesn't feel pain.

He stares at this girl. At this woman. This woman whom he used to think desecrated the Holy Trinity. Had brought the Great Divide of The Three Musketeers. But he knew now that the decay of their friendship had started long before Effy Stonem flounced into Roundview College.

And now look at where their orbits delivered them to: Cook in prison, Freddie dead, and Elizabeth Stonem perched in his room as if it's the most natural occurrence in the world.

She seems…brighter to him somehow. She is wearing an oversized black and gray striped t-shirt, some faded blue jeans with holes in the knees, and some scuffed black boots. (He briefly wonders how he didn't hear her come in). Her hair is pulled up into a loose ponytail, and a thick elastic gray headband keeps her fringe out of her eyes. And her eyes. He can feel all of her present. He can't quite explain it to himself, but he doesn't see the emptiness he used to see four years ago.

He takes the last swig of juice before chucking the container back to Effy and tilting his head slightly.

"How'd you know? About my mum dying, I mean." He still struggles with the words, fighting the truth from its journey from his brain to his tongue and out into the exposed open.

"I read the obituaries over breakfast," she replies simply, but it's not without care.

"Right," One Blink. Two Blinks.

"Of course." He's slightly thrown by the over simplicity of her admission.

She stares at him for a beat before looking out the window and continuing.

"It's fascinating, really. The lies people profess about the dead in order to comfort the living…"

She pauses before continuing.

"Celia Marie Jones, loving mother, adored wife. She left this world peacefully at 48. She leaves behind her only son, Jonah Jeremiah Jones, a promising junior accountant in London and her loving husband, Edward Benedict Jones, a retired optometrist and dutiful father."

Effy turns back from the window to find him gritting his teeth, and clenching his fists.

"That's. That's bullshit. She _didn't _die peacefully." He barely gets the bitter words out before his eyes go wide and his face drains of any remaining color. There is a loud crack and a crumbling sound and he looks bewildered at his elbow, which is now submerged in the wall behind him. He feels a wave of nausea surfacing as he bolts past Effy into the adjoining toilet, only to dry heave into the bowl. His fists pounding the wall behind the porcelain structure is the only other sound puncturing the deadened silence.

The toilet eventually flushes. He returns to the periphery of the room to find Effy hasn't moved an inch.

He suddenly feels filthy. Dirty. He looks at his hands to find that there is still dirt caked on his cuticles and under his finger nails from when he tossed soil into the grave this morning. Into _her_ grave.

He shrugs off his suit jacket and tosses it onto the bed. And he feels smaller. So fucking, _fucking_ small. He crosses his arms across his chest. He uncrosses them. He fiddles with the stupid tie. He crosses his arms again. He's not locked on.

He's locked up.

Chest constricting. Heart breaking.

He hears the fluid rushing through his aching head as he squeezes his eyes shut.

Everything fucking hurts.

He tries to convince himself that this is a normal physiological symptom of grief.

This is normal.

He is normal.

He is not locked on.

He blurts out the first thing on his mind.

"I need to take a shower." He grips the wood of the doorway until his knuckles turn white.

"Will you— Don't…don't leave, okay? Please?"

She makes sure he's looking into her eyes as she replies, "I'm not going anywhere."

He lets out a relieved sigh as he closes the door behind him and sheds the rest of his clothing.

…

The bloke who installed the Jones' plumbing when they first moved in was possibly a bit daft and probably quite stoned. All of their fixtures had little quirks to them. However, over the years, capable contractors had been hired to remedy the flaws. But JJ's shower kept falling off the fix-it list. The COLD and the HOT knobs were switched and had to be combined at just the right angles to create a pleasant shower. But it was a routine Jonah Jeremiah Jones had been doing since he began taking his own baths at six, and he could do it on autopilot.

He adjusts the temperature with a short flurry of actions with the knobs before stepping into the tub and hissing as the hot water seeps into every cut and batters every rising bruise. He dumps a generous amount of shampoo straight from the bottle onto his head. And it is a masochistic ritual as he scrubs his scalp, vigorously agitating the bald spots as he digs his fingers in.

In his own apartment in London, the heat in the shower is easily adjusted with the right knobs. In his London apartment, there aren't any holes in the wall or Sharpie maniacally scrawled across various surfaces. In his London apartment, everything is neat and orderly. In his London apartment, there are only three pill containers in the medicine cabinet and only two are taken daily. In his London apartment, he uses a French press for coffee because he doesn't have to rely on a timed machine and it gives him something to talk about at the office: the manual power of things. In his London apartment, a print of _Almond Blossoms _hangs in the guest room because it's her favorite. In his London apartment, things were getting better.

But in Bristol, he stands defeated and lost underneath the showerhead, letting the cold water cascade down his back and over his face. It's a little suffocating. It's a little like crying.

He towels off and stares at his reflection as he eyes the electric razor at the end of the counter in the mirror, and his mirrored self picks it up.

…

He finds Effy exactly where he left her in his withered armchair. She's tucked her feet underneath her and she is tracing the thin, white scars along her wrists with her pinky finger. The brunette looks up when he enters the room. She does not seem surprised to see his hair shaven down to a thin buzz. He scans the room, taking in his chaos. Entropy in action.

"Fuck…I've ruined everything"

He begins to absentmindedly pick up chunks of cork from the floor.

One piece has a flyer still pinned to it. It's from Thomas's youth DJ workshop in the Congo.

Another scrap is adhered to a postcard from Emily. A Mexican fire-eater leers into the camera, his face contorted with skull face paint. On the other side is Emily's neat type: "Ask for It. Love, Ems... (_and Naomi, too_)."

He picks up a large coin from his dresser and makes it travel across his knuckles.

"Why did you come here, Effy?" He keeps his voice level and his eyes on the flip-flopping piece of metal rolling from pinky to pointer and back. He has his towel wrapped loosely around his lean waist.

She waits until he meets her gaze, and she smirks before answering.

"You've seen me naked". Her face takes on a more solemn, softer form as she continues.

"And you were worried… and you loved me"

She states it as if it's the simplest thing. And it is, in a way.

He sighs and sweeps his hand around the ruckus of the room.

"I haven't done this since college. This isn't me anymore. It's just—"

"A month ago, I parked my mother's car in her closed garage and left it running," Effy interrupts, dropping her blue eyes to the ground.

"Wha-, why?"

The coin drops to the ground with a muted 'ping' as it hits the rug.

"I just wanted to sleep, I guess. I wanted that feeling when I first get up in the morning and I forget all the darkness, just for a bit…But I'm not one for permanence. Not really."

She looks at him without really looking at him, and he is reminded of his mother just then.

"We lose ourselves sometimes, Jonah."

There is something in the way she says his name that seems sad. Disappointed almost.

She elegantly lifts herself off of the chair, and she takes steady, easy steps. She nudges his travel bag by his bed with her boot, which results in a faint rattle. She stoops down and shoves her hands into the bag. Her left hand emerges holding four prescription bottles embraced in her long fingers. Her right hand cradles a bundle of trousers and a blue t-shirt. She makes her way over to where he is standing by the dresser. She lines the bottles up one by one, like obedient soldiers and gently shoves the bundle of clothes into his arms.

He swiftly twists the caps off all four bottles and takes a pill from each one before throwing his head back and letting the four capsules rattle in his mouth before he swallows them. He begins to methodically rub the fabric of the trousers clutched in his arms as his eyes move from the woman next to him to the gaping holes in the blue plaster. Like open wounds in the walls. He feels naked, regardless of the towel.

His face grows hot as he becomes ashamed of his primal rage and he realizes he feels _nothing_ for this house, this shell.

He sends out a plea into the silence.

"Can we go somewhere? Anywhere?"

"Of course."

He hurriedly throws on the clothes and watches Effy pick up a canvas backpack he did not see perched by the chair. He fetches his keys from the crumpled heap in the bathroom, before leading them out of his room and down the stairs.

He can sense Effy pausing at the orderly photographs that accompany their descent down the stairs: JJ standing stiffly next to his parents for a Christmas photo, JJ clutching a trophy that he won for Bristol's Young Geniuses Award, JJ holding up a blue ribbon next to his winning science project, and one of a younger set of his parents standing by the seaside, grinning, his mother's hand rests on her stomach. He is puzzled by the unreadable expression on his friend's face.

He grabs his coat as he leads them out the door and fishes for the key to lock it.

"Don't you want to leave a note?" She asks dryly, behind him.

He laughs, darkly, while facing the door.

"My _father_ left for Luton right after the service. That's where my aunt lives, I guess. I doubt he'd notice my absence."

He frowns while he hears the satisfying click of the lock, and turns to follow her down the driveway to that familiar car. She unlocks the car with a remote and hops into the driver's side as he clambers in on the other side.

She shoves her hand into her rucksack and he hears a clinking of glass before her hand re-emerges with a crumpled paper bag that she unceremoniously plops onto his lap before gingerly placing the pack in the back seat. He pulls out two sandwiches: tomato, lettuce, and mayonnaise. He's touched that she remembers the odd combination as he starts to pick at it in earnest, realizing his last attempt at food had been at the wake.

The car rumbles to life and they peel out of the driveway and out onto the road.

After two attempts at trying to get Effy to tell him where they were headed, he gives up and rests his head against the seat as the houses become farther apart and the sun threatens to throw itself down below the horizon.

….

Their ride is surprisingly brief. But the outskirts of Bristol provide enough of an escape. Effy pulls off to the side of the road which has turned from asphalt to gravel to dirt, and he finds a small pleasure in the sound of the tires crunching soil as they halt to a stop near the bottom of a hill. His friend grabs her pack from the back, opens her door, and hops onto the hood of the car. He follows, gingerly joining her, while ignoring the pain.

She grabs a glass bottle of vodka and a thermos from the bag and hands the canister to JJ. He sniffs it, more mango juice, and lets out a small smile. He looks questioningly between the vodka and Effy. She reads his mind.

"I'm off my meds. Bit of a trial run with my psychiatrist. Alcohol allowed in small doses in emergencies." She grins as she waves the bottle in front of her face before taking a swig. Her eyes are shining in the waning sun.

He tries not to feel competitive. He was down to _two pills_ before he came back here. He is pulled from his cloud of envy as Effy speaks again.

"I wrote an obituary for my brother, once. When he was in a coma. I watched him every day in the hospital and I wrote it by his bedside," she states in a monotone voice.

"It wasn't much of a comfort to the living though: 'Anthony Nicholas Stonem leaves behind a vacant father, an alcoholic mother, and a younger sister who is so… fuck-ing alone'… "

She screws the cap back on the bottle and rests it under her chin before continuing.

"My mother picked it off his nightstand one night as I was coming back into the room. And…

And she just _looked_ at me, like… like I was this…this monstrous thing."

JJ thinks of the splintered wood and crumbled drywall back in his room, and silently nods.

"But, she was still there…you know…after Freddie…and…and," her voice dies in her throat.

He tries to sort out his emotions. What he is feeling. He fails, so he turns to the static comfort of numbers.

" Seventeen Thousand, Eight Hundred and Forty Seven," he utters. His voice is hollow, and he feels Effy waiting patiently beside him, urging him to continue.

"That's how many days my mum spent on this earth. And most of them were spent dealing with _me_," he says evenly.

"She could've been so… _happy._..if I wasn't..." He gestures wildly at himself trying to control the anger quickly rising to the surface.

"She wasn't supposed to _die._ She just started bleeding…just started bleeding from her nose, at her co-worker's scrapbooking party. Aneurysm. Brain Hemorrhage."

He tosses the thermos away from the car violently. He winces as he hears it land with a thud a few metres away. His hands reach up to his skull and he digs his fingertips into the scalp, thankful that he didn't leave any strands of hair left to his mercy. He lets his hands drop into his lap and they are quickly joined with Effy's as he continues.

"My mum died alone at a _fucking_ craft night with strangers. And again, comatose, with my fucking _father _in the hospital. Because I couldn't even get on the right train to be with her. Because…Because I'm…I'm _broken_, Eff.

I thought I could be good. I thought I could be better,

But…I _can't_ ,

I just _can't. _I just can't."

The sun has left them alone at the edge of a field. And JJ can barely make out Effy's outline as she pulls one hand away and into her pocket. Her face is illuminated a moment later with the click of a lighter as she drags in the first smoke from a fag. He can see that some of the emptiness is back in her eyes and he can't help but feel envious again as he notices her puffy red eyes before she is enveloped in darkness once more.

They sit in silence for a moment, then Effy hops off the car and stands in front of him. He sees the embers of her cigarette float from her mouth down to his hand as she places it between his fingers.

She sniffs hurriedly before whispering across the darkness to him.

"Indulge us sinners tonight, Jonah. Just this once."

And with that, she walks off towards the hill. He hears her backpack lifted onto her shoulder, and he is confused because he hears that glass clinking again, but the vodka had been tossed into the field. He looks down at the fag between his fingers.

_What's a little more pain?_ He pauses, then brings it to his lips and drags. It feels like second-hand, but stronger. He imagines the smoke swirling around his lungs as he follows Effy up the hill.

She is waiting for him at the top. A phantom in the darkness. Her monotone voice fills the night air between them.

"I have to quit smoking, eventually. Because I'm not paying a fortune for a pack every week in London."

She continues walking, not waiting for him to catch up.

He stops. The words slide into place, and the information solicits a small smile as he jogs to catch up.

She clambers through light overgrowth with ease and JJ is fast at her heels. Her confident strides bring them to a small clearing and his eyes adjust to the moonlight.

A lake seems to magically form in front of them as he absorb the night.

"It's aesthetically beautiful," he states. It is so much more, and they both know it. But his simple statement suffices for now.

Effy brings out a blanket from her pack and lays it on the cold forest floor. JJ plops down, exhausted, but Effy doesn't join him. He hears glass shattering directly behind him and he squashes down his anxiety as he sees his friend carrying an odd object back to the blanket.

He again hears the flicker of a lighter as Effy lights a candle at the edge of the blanket, and he can't help but gasp.

She smiles softly as he looks at the thing in her hand. It's a ship in a bottle he and his mum had built one winter. Only now it lies naked without its glass protection in his friend's hands. It had somehow escaped the violence of his fit in his room, and he thinks of Effy covertly and gingerly placing it in her pack. She silently takes the model ship to the water's edge and sets it off on its voyage.

They watch its small silhouette float across the water, straining through the darkness to witness its trajectory.

The candle sputters out and they sit in deafeningly loud silence and darkness.

He hears Effy rustling around her pack again, and her face is illuminated once again as she lights another candle. The rustling of paper and cloth disrupts the silence once more, and a heavy square object is placed in his lap. He goes to lift it, but his hands are stilled and covered by hers. Her full blue eyes stare into his.

They are close enough that he can see freckles and marks he's never noticed before.

He can smell vodka and cigarette smoke.

He sits as still as he can and closes his eyes as Effy leans in farther and places a kiss on his left eyelid, and then on his right. She places a small peck on his nose.

She kisses him fully on the mouth, her hand reaching behind him to rest it on the back of his neck.

It is intimate, but it is not wanting. Her mouth moves to his ear, and he can't help but shiver. He almost doesn't hear her whisper above his pounding heart.

"You are beautiful. You're a_ fucking_ beautiful person…Happy Birthday, JJ."

She's already far away when he opens his eyes.

"I'll be in the car," she whispers across the darkness before disappearing completely.

He remembers oxygen.

He remembers carbon dioxide.

He vaguely tries to recall the process needed between the two. His lungs thank him for remembering the exchange.

He looks down to the object in his lap. He pulls away the cloth and stiffens as he sees his mother's handwriting glaring back at him in luminescent ink.

He blinks once. He blinks twice. He lets his scabbed hands trace the letters, and the letters become words.

_Jonah Jeremiah Jones. _

A book. A scrapbook.

His hands are shaking as he turns to the first page. A pink, squishy infant stares out at him from the page. The baby is being held by his mother. Only she's younger, and there aren't any bags under her eyes. He gingerly rubs his index finger over the words at the bottom of the page. _My sweet boy. _

He turns to the next page to find a toddler-sized version of himself grinning mischievously, a wooden spoon in his hand and flour in his dark locks. _Jonah "helping" with dinner. _Little stickers of pots and pans and foods are scattered across the page. The next page has two photos of his ten-year-old self. In the first, he's wearing his magician's cape and top hat smiling into the camera. In the second, he's wearing the same outfit on the same day, but he's wearing a faraway expression on his face, oblivious to the crowd of people around him.

He turns the pages, soaking it all in. The pictures are old, but they are new to him. He struggles to see with the sputtering candle. He stops on a picture of him leaving for the Love Ball, with Emily sticking her tongue out at the camera and Freddie's goofy face stealing the spotlight.

He wonders if it is starting to rain as wetness soaks into the paper. He draws his hand up to his cheek, and he is shocked to find that he is the source.

He fills his lungs and screams loudly, his exertions race across the clearing, over the lake, and back at him. He convulses on the ground, sobbing uncontrollably, letting the reverberations surround him. His grief magnifies a thousand times over.

He is left in the darkness as the candle gives up.

He continues to cry, to howl, to feel.

He is not polite.

He is not controlled.

He just feels.

Feels whole.

**End.**


End file.
